This past Thursday, May 6th I noticed the inclusion of 2 KML files and a custom Google Map in the universal search results for my name. I’m not sure of the exact date this change took place, but it seems to have been on either last Wednesday or Thursday.

There are currently 2 KML files on page one and a custom Google Map on page two. As you will see on the image below, the first KML file is hosted on justinblase.com and the second KML file is from a Google custom map I created.

On the second page of the search results there is a Google Maps result for the custom map I created. I am curious to see if this is a test that will be ending shortly or if we can expect to continue to see maps results (outside of the traditional 7,3, & 1 pack) within Google SERPS.

Page One

Page Two

These last 3 days Google has done a lot to help confirm what most search marketers have been thinking for a long time, local marketing seems to be a large part of the future of Google (which in turn makes it a top priority for all who want to continue to succeed in search marketing).

This all really comes as no surprise to most folks, but they have really opened the gates this week, further cementing the fact that local marketing is here to stay.

Let’s take a quick look at how the last few days played over on the Google Local Places front:

• Tuesday, April 20th Google Announces that they are officially changing the name of the Google Local Business Center to Google Places.  Place pages were launched this past September and have become a very important part of the local marketing strategies of businesses large and small.Along with the  name change, Google also officially announced service areas.

  These have been around for a few weeks, but Google decided to make it official on Tuesday – most likely because it was noted to be rather buggy for the first week or so.  These service areas allow business owners to specify a geographic region for which they will travel to or conduct business in.  This should help many home based businesses and services that don’t necessarily depend on an office location like taxi services and tow trucks.

  

  Another part of National Weed Day at Google included an expansion They expanded the cities in which businesses can take part in the paid/sponsored local search listings dubbed “Tags“.  To date the following cities are able to participate: Austin, Atlanta,  Washington, D.C. , Houston and San Jose, CA.   They also announced that within a few weeks they will be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
  

  
  In addition to all of this they announced Business Photo Shoots, customized QR codes through the Google Places dashboard and the rollout of another round of Favorite Places window decals.

• Wednesday, April 21stOn Wednesday, the Big G announced the integration of Google Buzz with Google Maps.  To enable it, the next time you are viewing a Google Map, select “Buzz” from the “more” menu in the top-right corner of the map.  This will allow a new layer to appear on the map displaying the geolocation of “buzzes”.  Awesome.
• Thursday, April 22ndThursday Google announced that they have added a search suggestion function to the search box on Google maps.  This operates essentially the same way as the suggestions that populate in the drop down box on a standard Google search do.  This may provide a few opportunities for clever marketers

Let’s see what Friday brings!

Several months ago I wrote about the missed opportunity of many online store owners by not taking advantage of Google Base to upload their store inventory and optimizing for inclusion in Google product search (and more importantly in the Shopping results embedded in the Google universal search results).

The face of Google universal search has been in a constant state of change for several years now… but with the integration of real time search, local search, video, forum discussions, images and more over the last couple years – it has become clear to savvy Internet marketers that you must strike when the iron is hot.

This is important for 2 reasons:

1. Striking while the iron is hot can result in a tsunami of relevant, high converting website traffic
2. The iron can be taken away at any time… and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it… so ride it out while you can

For E-commerce store owners, the “hot iron” lies in utilizing Google Base & Google Product Search.  Check out a few of the examples below that illustrate opportunities:

Let’s say I want to research rain gauges online in order to score a cheap, good one (I forgot to pour out the water back in November before it froze and cracked the bejesus out of my old one).  If I head over to Google and search for “best rain gauge”, I am presented with the following:

The “3rd result” in the universal results belongs to a “3 pack” of shopping results pulled from Google Product Search (which is fed directly from data feeds via Google Base from e-commerce store owners around the world).

Take notice of the fact that there are over 1.7 million competing pages for the keyword phrase, but these product results surface near the very top – not to mention the fact they stick out like a sore thumb essentially screaming for attention with the product image, reviews and pricing information.

The best part of marketing products online via Google Product Search is the fact that a. the service is absolutely free, and b. the process itself can be completely automated with a bit of creativity and smarts.

Today the search giant Google began discussing ways in which it can begin crawling Ajax based websites.  This would be a welcomed change for webmasters that are forced to choose between the usability benefits of an Ajax based site and the necessity of sticking to website designs and functions that are more search engine friendly.

There are some challenges that Google would be faced if this were to be implemented.  One that comes to mind would be some of the more “shady” webmasters manipulating the code to serve different information to search engines than to site visitor’s, similar to cloaking methods currently used by many “blackhat” webmasters.

The announcement was just made today and the idea is still somewhat in its infancy.  It is certainly a step in the right direction and would be an excellent enhancement.  Google is welcoming any feedback on ideas / concerns with this.  Feedback can be provided here.

Below is a slideshow of the proposal:

Over the last couple years Google has been moving more towards a universal search model that provides searchers more diverse results than simply listings for related static pages on the web.  Over the course of the last year and a half you have probably noticed YouTube videos, Google Shopping results, book results, blog posts and many more different types of results returned for certain search queries.

The most recent addition to Google search engine results pages is related forum posts.  Google introduced these types of results on September 30, 2009.  For certain types of search phrases, you may now find a series of recent (or in some cases not so recent) forum posts.

Here is an example for a recent search for “cooking chili in a crockpot”:

I have also noticed that the same exact thing is happening with Yahoo! Answers posts for several “How To” types of questions.

Google has made mention of placing more emphasis on returning relevant “real-time” results for search queries… this seems to be a step in that direction.

This opens up an additional reason for webmasters and Internet marketers to add forum marketing to their overall strategy.  Not only does having an active forum presence in your market beneficial for ranking easily in organic search results as in the example above, it provides a great opportunity to establish a voice of authority and build some nice backlinks from high page rank authority sites.

Google announced today that it has added an enhancement to the seach snippet that is displayed to users on search engine results pages.  Prior to today, search snippets were only comprised of the META description provided by webmasters, a snippet randomly taken off the page by Google, or a combination of both.

From today on, seach snippets on results pages can also include named anchors in a contextual text link format to help users jump directly to specific locations on the page rather than always being taken to the top of the page and being forced to scroll through all of the page content in order to locate the desired information.

Here are examples of 2 search snippets that include the new named anchors:

What Does This Mean For Search Marketers?

It appears that there is now a good reason to include named anchors in page content.  It would be a safe bet to assume that search snippets containing a relevant named anchor that is now clickable and blue instead of an entirely plain text snippet could lead to an increase in click throughs from organic search results.

Most folks involved with search engine optimization have had a hunch for a couple years now that Google doesn’t give much weight to the Keyword META tags.  In a recent video by Matt Cutts, Google’s voice in search engine optimization matters, it was stated that Google does not use the keyword META tags at all when ranking pages.

Keep in mind, there are other search engines that may… but it’s highly doubtful that either Bing or Yahoo! places much value on them either.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts:

There is some debate amongst the professional SEO community as to whether or not “first link priority” is or is not observed by Google.  For those of you that are unfamiliar to “first link priority”, it relates to observations made by several SEOs over the past year and a half that claim Google places a higher level of “importance” on the very first link it crawls on a page. (You may notice the anchor text of the first link on this blog is ‘home’…. not exactly what I should be targeting with this blog… but oh well, this is just for fun)

The phenomenon of first link priority is important to the internal linking structure of your site because the anchor text and link URL you choose to put in this location allegedly get the majority of love from the Big G.  If I were to tweak one thing on this blog to ensure that I was adhering to all SEO best practices, it would be to change the anchor text in the first navigational tab at the top of the page from ‘Home’ to something like ‘SEO Blog’… of course, since my logo is also clickable I would need to utilize some fancy CSS work to ensure that the ‘SEO Blog’ link is appearing above all other links in my blog’s code.

I have not personally been able to determine on my own whether or not “First Link Priority” is reality or simply “guru talk”… though to be safe I tend to to observe it and structure pages accordingly during the site development phase for clients.  This can be done via CSS or in tables if using HTML.

Google Docs, the free suite of online office tools will start being crawled and indexed soon.  According to a post made by a Google employee on the Google Docs help forum, “This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

Google Docs, which is being used by millions as a free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite, currently offers programs for creating and editing word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations and forms.

How To Keep Your Docs Private

It is important to note, due to Google Docs being crawled, if you create a document that you do not want to potentially show up in search results, make sure you choose the “stop publishing” option under the “publish / embed” settings under the “share” tab…. especially if you are one that keeps a spreadsheet of  usernames and logins for websites and software programs.

It will be interesting to see whether or not organizations will be able to benefit in terms of SEO from this change.  PDF documents have been crawled and indexed for years, and in my experience tend to rank even higher than standard html or php pages for certain types of keyword phrases…. looks like it’s time to run some tests!

In the current search engine marketing climate, it’s no secret that a large number of relevant (or semi relevant) external links pointing back to your website can help give you a leg up in organic search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy to secure a large enough number of relevant links, so creativity is a must if you plan to edge out your competitors in organic search rankings.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have been known to reward sites for certain types of backlinks one day and then “slap” the sites the next day, causing a significant drop in search engine rankings.  In order to ensure that your website’s traffic is not solely at the mercy of particular algorithm change, make sure you take time to plan out a link building strategy ahead of time that utilizes various link types.

How Is This Achieved?

To make sure your backlink profile has enough variation to weather search engine algorithm updates, one should keep a few things in mind:

1. Stay away from individuals or companies that offer to submit your site to several thousand website directories.Not only is directory submission rather pointless in my opinion (aside from about 50 solid directories), companies that offer these types of services rarely vary anchor text, page titles and descriptions which is essential to developing a natural looking backlink profile.
2. Be creative! One of the most important keys to successful link building (and online marketing in general) is creativity.  It pays to secure links from sites that aren’t linking out to hundreds of other sites.  Step outside the box and think of ways to get links from these authority sites and your rankings will thank you.
3. Always be ready to leave a link!Some of the best opportunities to leave a backlink come when you least expect (and most likely don’t actually have time to drop a link).  Keep a spreadsheet of potential places to drop a backlink and make sure to check it weekly so you don’t get behind.